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Web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers

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Re: Web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers

#51

Post by jules »

andy_ppp wrote: post #33

Domain specific languages I suppose are the next cool aid. Or languages with a comprehensive macro system (like Elixir) can bridge the gap between these ways of thinking. This feels very frontend focused though - I'm wondering if there is a more holistic approach. I have an idea for a framework/project, that over web sockets, views the browser as a thin client for a server side representation; commands would be sent…

Seaside from Smalltalk. To some extent the original ASP. There is also a PHP framework that does that, but I forgot it's name.

Re: Web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers

#52

Post by Bogdanp »

andy_ppp wrote: post #33

Domain specific languages I suppose are the next cool aid. Or languages with a comprehensive macro system (like Elixir) can bridge the gap between these ways of thinking. This feels very frontend focused though - I'm wondering if there is a more holistic approach. I have an idea for a framework/project, that over web sockets, views the browser as a thin client for a server side representation; commands would be sent…

Not exactly the same but you might want to check out Ur/Web, Eliom and the standard Racket web server lib.

Re: Web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers

#53

Post by randomstudent »

andy_ppp wrote: post #33

Domain specific languages I suppose are the next cool aid. Or languages with a comprehensive macro system (like Elixir) can bridge the gap between these ways of thinking. This feels very frontend focused though - I'm wondering if there is a more holistic approach. I have an idea for a framework/project, that over web sockets, views the browser as a thin client for a server side representation; commands would be sent…

Yes. This Elixir library aims to have a virtual DOM on the server and send minimal diffs to the client: https://github.com/grych/drab

It can already do this for some kinds of diffs, but it doesn't have a full VDOM yet. It basically allows you to build interactive pages without writing any javascript.

Re: Web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers

#54

Post by thinkloop »

andy_ppp wrote: post #33

Domain specific languages I suppose are the next cool aid. Or languages with a comprehensive macro system (like Elixir) can bridge the gap between these ways of thinking. This feels very frontend focused though - I'm wondering if there is a more holistic approach. I have an idea for a framework/project, that over web sockets, views the browser as a thin client for a server side representation; commands would be sent…

> DOM diff-ing on the server and have the thin client only transfer the changes. This would hopefully make the initial payload extremely small and the changes being transferred minimal as well.

To achieve similar results, you could granularly partition the build so that scripts are lazy loaded as needed. This would be like sending diffs, except only once since the client can reuse them.

Having a server manage the DOM state of every client, and maintaining sockets between them, seems like a complex apparatus.

Re: Web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers

#55

Post by pas »

kolme wrote: post #10
cromwellian wrote: post #4

"The trend started by minifiers like UglifyJS and continued by transpilers like Babel will only accelerate." Those were predated by Closure Compiler, which was started with Gmail, and Closure Compiler in some ways still doesn't have an equal. Besides being a fully optimizing compiler, it also has a module system for code splitting, and optimization passes designed to move code at the method/property level from initia…

Those features are supported in Webpack and other bundlers. Code splitting: https://webpack.js.org/guides/code-splitting/ Tree shaking: https://webpack.js.org/guides/tree-shaking/

https://github.com/webpack/webpack/issues/2867 - "Tree shaking completely broken?"

It turns out that it basically supported "skip loading of unnecessary ES6 modules", so kind of like a "warn: unused import", but turned into a silence and no-op.

Now with Uglify getting the "pure" annotation, and libraries sprinkling that onto their code, it'll help a bit.

Re: Web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers

#56

Post by noway421 »

andy_ppp wrote: post #33

Domain specific languages I suppose are the next cool aid. Or languages with a comprehensive macro system (like Elixir) can bridge the gap between these ways of thinking. This feels very frontend focused though - I'm wondering if there is a more holistic approach. I have an idea for a framework/project, that over web sockets, views the browser as a thin client for a server side representation; commands would be sent…

Like an X Server for the DOM? While interesting, that means that every communication would need to be tranfered to the server and there'd be no instant one-frame actions. That fits a limited set of UIs. And would lag with substantial network latency

Re: Web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers

#57

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #36

OT, but this jumped out to me: > In the same way that a compiled Android binary bears little resemblance to the original Java source code From what I recall, Java binaries actually look a lot like their source code. They're not human-readable of course, but you can decompile them very easily and get fairly good code back out. This made Minecraft an easy game to mod: just decompile a class, change a line or two, recom…

Not really. The bytecode format (.dex) is different, but it's straightforward to convert dex files back to jar files, and then decompile the jar and get readable Java source.

Re: Web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers

#58

Post by pjmlp »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #36

OT, but this jumped out to me: > In the same way that a compiled Android binary bears little resemblance to the original Java source code From what I recall, Java binaries actually look a lot like their source code. They're not human-readable of course, but you can decompile them very easily and get fairly good code back out. This made Minecraft an easy game to mod: just decompile a class, change a line or two, recom…

That is only true on a naive compilation, that doesn't make much use of language features introduced since Java 7.

Many companies make use of bytecode obfuscators to make it harder to translate back.

In Adroid not only is obfuscation part of the build process (ProGuard), there is the additional step of converting from Java bytecodes into DalvikVM bytecodes.

So if you only have DalvikVM bytecodes, you might translate to something back that looks like Java, but it won't be the original code.

Re: Web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers

#59

Post by pjmlp »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #57
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #36

OT, but this jumped out to me: > In the same way that a compiled Android binary bears little resemblance to the original Java source code From what I recall, Java binaries actually look a lot like their source code. They're not human-readable of course, but you can decompile them very easily and get fairly good code back out. This made Minecraft an easy game to mod: just decompile a class, change a line or two, recom…

Not really. The bytecode format (.dex) is different, but it's straightforward to convert dex files back to jar files, and then decompile the jar and get readable Java source.

But it won't be "the original Java source code", specially with ProGuard and more advanced Java constructs, or even if another JVM language is being used.

Re: Web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers

#60

Post by pjmlp »

noway421 wrote: post #56
andy_ppp wrote: post #33

Domain specific languages I suppose are the next cool aid. Or languages with a comprehensive macro system (like Elixir) can bridge the gap between these ways of thinking. This feels very frontend focused though - I'm wondering if there is a more holistic approach. I have an idea for a framework/project, that over web sockets, views the browser as a thin client for a server side representation; commands would be sent…

Like an X Server for the DOM? While interesting, that means that every communication would need to be tranfered to the server and there'd be no instant one-frame actions. That fits a limited set of UIs. And would lag with substantial network latency

I once saw a company that had a product which was basically JSF as network protocol for Swing.
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